No Arabic abstract
We propose an efficient pipeline for large-scale landmark image retrieval that addresses the diversity of the dataset through two-stage discriminative re-ranking. Our approach is based on embedding the images in a feature-space using a convolutional neural network trained with a cosine softmax loss. Due to the variance of the images, which include extreme viewpoint changes such as having to retrieve images of the exterior of a landmark from images of the interior, this is very challenging for approaches based exclusively on visual similarity. Our proposed re-ranking approach improves the results in two steps: in the sort-step, $k$-nearest neighbor search with soft-voting to sort the retrieved results based on their label similarity to the query images, and in the insert-step, we add additional samples from the dataset that were not retrieved by image-similarity. This approach allows overcoming the low visual diversity in retrieved images. In-depth experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing approaches on the challenging Google Landmarks Datasets. Using our methods, we achieved 1st place in the Google Landmark Retrieval 2019 challenge and 3rd place in the Google Landmark Recognition 2019 challenge on Kaggle. Our code is publicly available here: url{https://github.com/lyakaap/Landmark2019-1st-and-3rd-Place-Solution}
The re-ranking approach leverages high-confidence retrieved samples to refine retrieval results, which have been widely adopted as a post-processing tool for image retrieval tasks. However, we notice one main flaw of re-ranking, i.e., high computational complexity, which leads to an unaffordable time cost for real-world applications. In this paper, we revisit re-ranking and demonstrate that re-ranking can be reformulated as a high-parallelism Graph Neural Network (GNN) function. In particular, we divide the conventional re-ranking process into two phases, i.e., retrieving high-quality gallery samples and updating features. We argue that the first phase equals building the k-nearest neighbor graph, while the second phase can be viewed as spreading the message within the graph. In practice, GNN only needs to concern vertices with the connected edges. Since the graph is sparse, we can efficiently update the vertex features. On the Market-1501 dataset, we accelerate the re-ranking processing from 89.2s to 9.4ms with one K40m GPU, facilitating the real-time post-processing. Similarly, we observe that our method achieves comparable or even better retrieval results on the other four image retrieval benchmarks, i.e., VeRi-776, Oxford-5k, Paris-6k and University-1652, with limited time cost. Our code is publicly available.
Visual tracking is typically solved as a discriminative learning problem that usually requires high-quality samples for online model adaptation. It is a critical and challenging problem to evaluate the training samples collected from previous predictions and employ sample selection by their quality to train the model. To tackle the above problem, we propose a joint discriminative learning scheme with the progressive multi-stage optimization policy of sample selection for robust visual tracking. The proposed scheme presents a novel time-weighted and detection-guided self-paced learning strategy for easy-to-hard sample selection, which is capable of tolerating relatively large intra-class variations while maintaining inter-class separability. Such a self-paced learning strategy is jointly optimized in conjunction with the discriminative tracking process, resulting in robust tracking results. Experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed learning framework.
Nowadays, deep learning is widely applied to extract features for similarity computation in person re-identification (re-ID) and have achieved great success. However, due to the non-overlapping between training and testing IDs, the difference between the data used for model training and the testing data makes the performance of learned feature degraded during testing. Hence, re-ranking is proposed to mitigate this issue and various algorithms have been developed. However, most of existing re-ranking methods focus on replacing the Euclidean distance with sophisticated distance metrics, which are not friendly to downstream tasks and hard to be used for fast retrieval of massive data in real applications. In this work, we propose a graph-based re-ranking method to improve learned features while still keeping Euclidean distance as the similarity metric. Inspired by graph convolution networks, we develop an operator to propagate features over an appropriate graph. Since graph is the essential key for the propagation, two important criteria are considered for designing the graph, and three different graphs are explored accordingly. Furthermore, a simple yet effective method is proposed to generate a profile vector for each tracklet in videos, which helps extend our method to video re-ID. Extensive experiments on three benchmark data sets, e.g., Market-1501, Duke, and MARS, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Re-identification of individual animals in images can be ambiguous due to subtle variations in body markings between different individuals and no constraints on the poses of animals in the wild. Person re-identification is a similar task and it has been approached with a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that learns discriminative embeddings for images of people. However, learning discriminative features for an individual animal is more challenging than for a persons appearance due to the relatively small size of ecological datasets compared to labelled datasets of persons identities. We propose to improve embedding learning by exploiting body landmarks information explicitly. Body landmarks are provided to the input of a CNN as confidence heatmaps that can be obtained from a separate body landmark predictor. The model is encouraged to use heatmaps by learning an auxiliary task of reconstructing input heatmaps. Body landmarks guide a feature extraction network to learn the representation of a distinctive pattern and its position on the body. We evaluate the proposed method on a large synthetic dataset and a small real dataset. Our method outperforms the same model without body landmarks input by 26% and 18% on the synthetic and the real datasets respectively. The method is robust to noise in input coordinates and can tolerate an error in coordinates up to 10% of the image size.
We propose an unsupervised hashing method which aims to produce binary codes that preserve the ranking induced by a real-valued representation. Such compact hash codes enable the complete elimination of real-valued feature storage and allow for significant reduction of the computation complexity and storage cost of large-scale image retrieval applications. Specifically, we learn a neural network-based model, which transforms the input representation into a binary representation. We formalize the training objective of the network in an intuitive and effective way, considering each training sample as a query and aiming to obtain the same retrieval results using the produced hash codes as those obtained with the original features. This training formulation directly optimizes the hashing model for the target usage of the hash codes it produces. We further explore the addition of a decoder trained to obtain an approximated reconstruction of the original features. At test time, we retrieved the most promising database samples with an efficient graph-based search procedure using only our hash codes and perform re-ranking using the reconstructed features, thus without needing to access the original features at all. Experiments conducted on multiple publicly available large-scale datasets show that our method consistently outperforms all compared state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing methods and that the reconstruction procedure can effectively boost the search accuracy with a minimal constant additional cost.